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Tuesday, December 31, 2013

The Lazy Runs Deep

A weird thing
happened. At the end of the
semester, on the day grades were due, we finally got an email from the data
structures professor letting us know that the grades for the final exam and
project were online, and that we could now view our final grades. This semester was really rough for me
(see the previous post) but I’d really thought I could pull a B out of this
class. But when I checked it, I
saw that the online gradebook had other ideas.

Now I know what I
expected to happen.I would
usually handle a disappointment like the C staring back at me with a heavy sigh
and a bitter remark and a dismissive wave of my hand.Life isn’t fair.I learned that a long time ago when my mother explained to me that I had
to be the older and therefore the more mature one when my sister and I would
get into skirmishes when we were little.But that wasn’t what happened.It wasn’t what happened at all.

I became possessed by
some person I haven’t seen since the ninth grade.I became angry.I became motivated. I
ranted for a while, to anyone within reach—my classmates, my mother.Then it hit me that I had less than 24
hours to dispute this grade and I absolutely nothing to lose by trying.Maybe it was futile.The grade was mostly my fault anyway—I
didn’t study well enough for the final exam, and I studied the wrong things,
and my grade reflected that.But
there were at least two grade points that I could attribute to the teaching
assistants’ inconsistent and lazy grading.Those were the points I needed to squeeze a B out of this
course, and I was clinging to them like the handlebar on an old roller coaster.

Amazingly, given the
height of my emotional distress at this point (as well as a mild identity
crisis I decided to put a pin in), I composed a 450-word email to the professor
that opened:

I'm sure you're
getting a lot of emails from students who are panicked about their grades here
at the last minute.This is one of
those emails.

Then I made my
case.I wasn’t fighting for truth
or justice, because I probably deserved the grade I’d been given.I was a lawyer on my own case, and I
was not about to take “C” for an answer (there’s a “sí” joke in there
somewhere, but I won’t make it so as to preserve the seriousness of this
story).

This professor, in
stark contrast to my other programming professor this semester, had always been
great about responding to student needs, pushing back project deadlines when
they lined up with projects and exams in other classes.I appealed to this tendency now.Much to my surprise, he gave me a
shot.He had the TA send me the
file they’d used to test our programs, and allowed me to correct the issue that
had cost me the points I needed.In a kind of daze, unable to fully believe, first, that I had initiated
this at all, and second, that it was actually happening, I dismissed myself and
left work.I raced home, dug out
my old program, and started coding furiously.In two and a half hours of harried coding and frantically
reading stackoverflow.com posts, I had solved the problem.It wasn’t easy.

"I can scare the stupid out of you,but the lazy runs deep."

My fingers shook as I
hit the button to send the program back to the teacher.I don’t know why they were shaking now;
maybe it had only just occurred to me to be freaked out about all of this.Who was this person who cared deeply
enough and contained enough fire to fight so hard for a couple of points?

Oh, me.Right.The professor emailed
me and told me he’d adjusted my grade.When I looked at the gradebook again, I saw that he’d given me exactly
the number of points I’d needed to reach a B.My grade is now an 80.01.I’d done it.I
hadn’t rolled over and taken a C.I had drawn my sword and fought.There is no reason I should have been allowed to actually make changes
and resubmit a project from weeks earlier and receive additional credit.But I’d channeled my inner Paris Geller
(Gilmore Girls?Anyone?), I’d
taken a shot and I’d made it.

I’m a little scared of
what this means going forward, but I’m more excited about the B.